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Embryo Tales
Lynn Morgan
Today it is commonplace for human embryos and fetuses to speak to all manner of social issues. In addition to
declaiming on the well-worn subject of abortion, embryos
and fetuses help advertise cars and telephone service, have
vehement reactions to vaccine and disease research, justify
the incarceration of pregnant women, motivate workplace
safety legislation, and hold forth on a host of other issues.
They are, in short, active agents. Feminist scholars have
been concerned about the rapid proliferation of “fetal subjects,” especially because the focus on fetuses threatens to
curtail reproductive options (Morgan and Michaels 1999).
Feminists have often identified modern visualizing technologies as one of the crucial elements in the creation of
fetal subjects, arguing that ultrasound and amniocentesis
permit some people to assign attributes of personhood to
the unborn.1
There is no question that the proliferation of visual
images since the 1970s has sparked a dramatic increase in
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the subjectivity recently granted to embryos and fetuses. In
this essay, I argue that human embryos were invoked as
political actors and agents as early as the 1910s and 1920s,
when a new visualizing technology allowed embryologists
to describe embryo forms and composition in unprecedented detail and thereby to attribute innovative meanings
to human embryos. Yet the images of embryos that scientists produced during that time did not immediately result
in personification of the embryo, nor did they much influence attitudes toward abortion, which was by then already
illegal in all states. Although today we tend to associate
visual images of human embryos and fetuses with the politics of abortion, I argue that the meanings ascribed to such
images vary depending on the context in which they are
visualized. I want to denaturalize the human embryo by
showing that visual depictions of it were not always considered relevant to abortion or reproductive politics. This
finding suggests that embryos do not take their meanings
from immanent qualities. Embryos do not themselves pose
conundrums or create disputes; rather, social controversies
provide the interpretive lenses through which embryos are
imbued with meaning (Addelson 1999).
Taking the contemporary feminist concern with the
animated fetal subject and projecting it backward to the
1910s and 1920s, I inquire in this chapter about the circumstances in which embryologists first coaxed their specimens to speak. In the waning years of the nineteenth century, a small group of human anatomists began to take an
interest in human embryos.2 By appealing to their clinical
colleagues, they painstakingly collected and preserved miscarried embryos and fetuses. They used the newest visualizing technology of their day, the microtome, to produce
models of the human embryo from the earliest, hitherto
unknown stages of development. With the scientific tools at
their disposal, they began to craft a tangible entity that had
long been imagined but rarely seen and never systematically studied.
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By producing visible evidence of the embryo’s contours
and dimensions, the embryologists set the stage for major
epistemological and ideological shifts. They claimed human
gestational development as a biomedical enterprise, the
embryo itself as a neutral biological product, embryo collecting as a valuable, legal, and ethically justifiable enterprise, and themselves as experts in a new professional specialty. From today’s vantage point we can see that the embryologists worked to collapse the distinction between “the way
a thing is made intelligible [and] the thing itself” (Stormer
2000:109). They claimed that they could interpret embryos
accurately and dispassionately by looking at the material evidence. Embryo specimens, they were certain, would carry
their meanings intact and “speak for themselves.”
As embryos began to enter public conversation in the
1910s and 1920s, the range of topics to which they were
considered relevant was much different from what it is
today. Most strikingly for our purposes, the embryo specimens were not considered pertinent to the social problems
of abortion, illegitimacy, and contraception, all of which
were nevertheless pressing issues at the time (Chesler 1992;
Fee 1987; Gordon 1976). Embryos were hitched to an
entirely different set of social problems, namely, evolution,
the “race problem,” and the relationship of humans to
nonhuman animals. In this chapter I explore how the
embryos got recruited as evidence in these particular social
dilemmas. I conclude that embryos are discursively produced within particular social dramas and hence are not
automatically or naturally associated with abortion or
reproductive freedom, as is so often assumed today.
A WORD ABOUT SEMANTICS
The favored term for the product of conception in the
early twenty-first century is “fetus,” although the word, like
its referent, is controversial. Antiabortion activists prefer
“unborn child,” “preborn,” “our little friend,” and so on,
because “fetus” is too clinical to confer the sympathetic
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appeal they seek. Pro-choice activists note that the term
“fetus” is often applied inappropriately throughout the
whole course of pregnancy, thereby collapsing the physiological and, presumably, moral differences that distinguish
a zygote from a ten-week embryo and a thirty-seven-week
viable fetus. Celeste Condit (1990) pointed out that abortion opponents have worked hard to forge a rhetorical connection between the term “fetus” and an arresting visual
image of the late-term fetus, thereby ensuring that “fetus”
performs antiabortion service. In spite of such terminological disputes, “fetus” has been the preferred term because
it is considered more neutral than other options.3
Early in the twentieth century, the term of choice was
“embryo,” although its use, too, was inconstant and controversial. In formal scientific contexts, embryologists used
“embryo” to refer to the developing human during the first
eight weeks of gestation, but in their correspondence and
publications they often used it to refer to all stages of development. A striking example of slippage between the terms
embryo and fetus is evident in the catalogue for the socalled human embryological collection amassed by North
American anatomists at the Peking Union Medical College
in the 1920s. According to the catalogue, the collection in
1925 contained 358 Chinese specimens, of which 254 were
normal (i.e., not obviously pathological). A closer look at
the list reveals that only 7 of the normal specimens were
embryos, whereas fully 239 were fetuses and 8 were infants
(Fortuyn 1927:68). Calling it an “embryological collection”
inflated its status (and the prestige of its producers) at a
time when anatomists coveted and cherished bona fide
human embryos. In this and many other contexts, the terms
embryo and fetus were actively contested throughout the
early twentieth century, much as they are today.
COMPOSING AMERICAN HUMAN EMBRYOLOGY
In 1883, a young American anatomist, Franklin Paine
Mall (1862–1917), traveled to his parents’ home country of
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Germany to study anatomy. There he encountered
Wilhelm His, who was intent on transforming embryology
into a systematic science (see Hopwood 2000). His had
begun to collect and study that rarest and most precious of
anatomical specimens, the young human embryo (which
he lovingly called “fruit”). When Mall became intrigued
with the project, His presented him with two human
embryos to take home. Mall brought the little immigrants
to the United States in 1886 and immediately began to augment his collection by asking his clinical colleagues to preserve any embryos or fetuses they might acquire. Here are
the first few lines of a circular Mall sent to doctors from his
post at Clark University, where he worked between 1889
and 1892: “During the last few years the kindness of several physicians has enabled me to procure for study about a
dozen human embryos less than six weeks old. As a specialist in embryology I ask if you can aid me in procuring
more material. It is constantly coming into your hands and
without your aid it is practically impossible to further the
study of human embryology.”
Mall was an intelligent man and an independent
thinker, although painfully shy. His ideas about how to professionalize and elevate the teaching of anatomy won
recognition in 1893 when he was appointed the first professor of anatomy at the new Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine. For several years Mall divided his time
between securing cadavers for dissection, teaching gross
anatomy, collecting embryos, and promoting the fields of
anatomy and human embryology. All the while, he and his
colleagues in other states worked with civil authorities to
set up the legislative and regulatory frameworks that would
make it legal for them to acquire and dissect embryo, fetal,
infant, and adult remains (Morgan 2002).
After several unsuccessful bids to find funding for an
embryological institute, Mall finally received a grant from
the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1913. Andrew
Carnegie’s foundation had a special interest in reproductive
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science; it also sponsored eugenics research at Cold Spring
Harbor and experimental marine embryology at the Woods
Hole Marine Biological Laboratory (Clarke 1998; Kohler
1991). The Carnegie Institution of Washington agreed to
fund a new, independent institute at the Johns Hopkins
medical school to house Mall’s increasingly valuable collection, which by that time numbered more than one thousand specimens, many of them intact and unsectioned.
The Carnegie Institution of Washington Department of
Embryology (CIWDE) would be devoted to the systematic
study of human embryology and dissemination of research
results through the journal Carnegie Contributions to
Embryology.
Because Mall and his colleagues were bench scientists
and teachers rather than clinicians, they relied on a network of clinical collaborators (many of them Johns Hopkins
alumni) to provide specimens. Most of their “material,” as
they called it, came from women who had aborted (whether
spontaneously or by induction was not specified), although
some embryos were discovered in the pathology laboratory
after elective hysterectomy or at autopsy. Each new specimen to arrive would come under the care of Osborne O.
Heard (1891–1983), a technician trained in sculpture and
pattern making who put his skills to work on the CIWDE
embryos for forty-two years, from 1914 to 1956. Heard and
his assistants at CIWDE took the greatest care to photograph, fix, slice, stain, mount, and measure each specimen.
Research at CIWDE centered on normal—as opposed to
teratological—morphology and development, although all
human embryologists were interested in the question of
whether environment or heredity was to blame in the etiology of “monsters” (Mall 1908; Sabin 1934:305–307).
Mall’s first two German embryos produced a steady supply of offspring in the United States. By the time Mall died
in 1917, at the age of fifty-seven, the CIWDE collection had
become an invaluable resource and the envy of anatomists
worldwide. George L. Streeter (1873–1948), the reluctant
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successor to the director’s post after Mall’s untimely death,
lacked Mall’s vision and determination. Nevertheless, with
the “generous provision” of the Carnegie Institution of
Washington, operations at CIWDE were “carried on without interruption” (Streeter 1917). Streeter expanded the
embryological research conducted at CIWDE to include
domestic pigs, sloths, chicks, alligators, opossums, rhesus
macaques, and other animals, but human embryos
remained the centerpiece of the collection (Corner
1946:126). By the time George W. Corner, an eminent
anatomist, science writer, and CIWDE director from 1940
to 1955, wrote his popular book Ourselves Unborn in 1944,
he could boast, “In the laboratory where these words are
being written, 9,000 human embryos and fetuses have been
entered in the record books, each one with its history of
frustration and its challenge to new discovery, each an honored and cherished gift upon the altar of truth” (Corner
1944:28–29).
The collection was considered embarrassingly old-fashioned by the 1960s, and at one point it was nearly
destroyed. It got a new lease on life in the 1990s in the form
of the visible embryo project, which digitalizes specimens
for online viewing and sectioning (see, for example, Smith
1999; http://embryo.soad.umich.edu/). Today the renowned
collection, with nearly ten thousand specimens, is housed
at the Human Developmental Anatomy Center, part of the
Research Collections division of the National Museum of
Health and Medicine.
The construction of embryology as a new area of expertise in the United States arose in tandem with rational, scientific practice and the “disciplining” of reproductive sciences (see Clarke 1998). Embryology was divided into two
realms: experimental marine embryology, centered at
Woods Hole, and human embryology, based at CIWDE at
Johns Hopkins. CIWDE was able to transform human
embryology from an anatomist’s hobby into a respectable
professional specialty. Mall and his colleagues obtained
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what had formerly been considered waste and turned it
into prized objects. They created a new vocabulary that
alienated embryological “specimens” from their origins in
women’s lives. They cast alternative forms of pregnancy
knowledge—such as that produced by women and midwives—as insignificant, superstitious, or wrong. They
entirely ignored the women who contributed specimens;
indeed, they celebrated the physicians—not the pregnant
women—who gave specimens to the collection. The work
they did resulted in the consolidation of embryological
knowledge, as well as the embryos themselves, within a
powerful and tenacious biomedical context.
After their initial work setting up the research facilities and collecting networks, CIWDE embryologists and
their colleagues at other institutions faced the question of
how to interpret sectioned embryos. What could they read
from their models and slides? What secrets would the
embryos reveal? As they dissected and described the specimens, they began to ascribe meaning to their creations.
Some of their descriptions were narrowly corporeal, such
as the development of the aortic arches. But in the process
of describing the human embryo’s empirical features, the
embryologists reified and constructed the embryo, changing
it from a speculative notion or putative entity into a tangible, verifiable object (Duden 1993b:2). CIWDE embryologists helped to turn what Duden called “fluxes and stagnations” (1993b:83) into modern, rational, embryo-logical
knowledge.
TEACHING THE EMBRYOS TO SPEAK
Today’s embryos and fetuses “speak” about such a wide
range of topics that it is hard to imagine them voiceless. Yet
there was a time, early in the twentieth century, when
embryologists pondered their mute, incipient subjects and
wondered what they might have to say. Certainly the early
embryos spoke about few of the topics their counterparts
address today. They did not, for example, reflect on the
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practice of embryo collecting; that would have been impossible, because the CIWDE embryologists themselves had
absolutely no reservations about collecting or sectioning
human embryos. The embryologists regarded the embryo
as a bit of biological material pure and simple, not as a
political lightning rod, an emotion-laden corpse, or a quintessential symbol of life. Not surprisingly, the embryos’ first
utterances could reflect only the concerns of those scientists who taught them to speak.
Of course embryos never “speak” for themselves, nor
do they “reveal” scientific secrets apart from the social context within which the embryos are produced (Clarke 1998;
Haraway 1992; Hartouni 1997). Understandings of human
embryos are always affected by context-specific meanings,
which explains why they “read” differently in a jar of
formaldehyde than in a commercial for long-distance telephone service. Yet the early human embryologists did not
think they were inventing the embryos or telling them what
to say. They thought of themselves not as ventriloquists or
scriptwriters but as interpreters or as channelers who
would give voice to the embryos’ materiality.
Initially, the embryos could only mutter softly about
their anatomical and morphological structure, which was
fine with the embryologists. “Structure,” one embryologist
said, “is the only distinctive mark of living bodies” (Minot
1906:19). To understand structure, embryologists used a
microtome to section each specimen. By sectioning several
specimens at sequential “stages” (i.e., gestational ages) and
comparing the progression, embryologists could describe
the development of specific organ systems. They wanted to
know, for example, whether the lymphatics arose from the
blood vessels and which bone centers were the first to ossify. Their audience was restricted to other embryologists.
My concern in this essay is not with their morphological
work, however, but with the processes through which they
brought embryos to bear on social issues and controversies
and, in turn, how those controversies came to appear to
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reside in the corporeal substance of the embryos. The
examples that follow demonstrate how embryos were mobilized to address debates over the uniqueness of the human
species, evolution, racial embryology, and the place of
embryology in producing knowledge and creating the fetal
subject. Through these examples, we begin to see the
embryo becoming a touchstone, an icon, in the pressing
social debates of the day.
CONCEIVING THE EMBRYONIC SUBJECT
Before the embryologists could begin to say what the
embryo was, they had to establish what it was not. They had
to establish, for example, that it was not unmentionable.
Until that time it would have been crass even to mention
the word “embryo” in polite company. Breaking that taboo
was crucial to the embryologists’ mission, for if “embryo”
could never be uttered, then the embryologists’ work
would remain insignificant as well. The project to modernize embryo etiquette was taken up by a sensitive female
champion of medicine, Armenouhie T. Lamson (1883–
1970). Lamson had migrated to the United States from
Turkey with her parents at the age of twenty-five. Two years
later she enrolled at the Johns Hopkins medical school to
study medical literature and art (from 1910 to 1912).
Lamson turned out to be a talented medical artist and
writer. In 1916 she wrote a popular book called My Birth:
The Autobiography of an Unborn Infant, which told the story
of human gestational development as a collective autobiography, in the first person, from the embryo’s point of
view.4 Lamson reminded readers that it was inappropriate
at the time to discuss a baby yet unborn. In the following
passage, her fetal narrator speaks to the reader about how
the reader cannot speak about her:
Yet to-day I am only a sweet but an unspeakable secret. Tomorrow my existence and my arrival will be heralded among
many people. To-day good form and good manners have
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barred me from the conversation of all well-bred people. Tomorrow I shall be the only proper and interesting topic of
their verbal intercourse. To-day only my mother takes me
seriously and considers me in her actions. To-morrow I shall
rule every member of her household. (Lamson 1916:134)
The embryologists faced other challenges. They had to
convince a skeptical public that a new life begins, biologically speaking, at conception rather than at quickening.
Because they devoted their careers to studying the first
eight weeks of gestational development, their professional
legitimacy rested on acceptance of this claim. It may have
been widely known by the middle of the nineteenth century that pregnancy began well before quickening, as Kristin
Luker argues (1984:25). But knowing this in the abstract
and believing it wholeheartedly were apparently still two
different things. Judging by the number and the stridency
of statements that appeared in textbooks and women’s
magazines in the early twentieth century, many doctors
apparently felt that their patients still needed to be convinced:
The word quickening means coming to life, and it was formerly believed that the baby was not an independent living
being until this symptom appeared. Of course, we know now
that such an idea was entirely wrong. The baby has a life of
its own from the moment of conception; this is not only scientifically established, but is recognized from the moral and
legal view-points as well. (Meaker 1927:41)
In our every-day way of speaking, fertilization means conception; it is the instant in which a living being begins its
existence. There is no longer the slightest excuse for confusion regarding the period at which the life of the unborn
child begins. Before the significance of fertilization was
understood, it was perhaps not unreasonable to believe that
life began with quickening or about the time the fetal heartsounds could be heard. But now we must acknowledge that
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both these ideas were incorrect. The animation of the ovum
at the moment of conception marks the beginning of
growth and development which constitutes its right to be
considered as a human being. (Slemons 1917:27–28)
The most effective way for embryologists to prove that
pregnancy began with conception was to materialize the
embryonic body, to show that it had (i.e., to give it) a shape
and a form (Morgan 1999). Embryologists provided the
evidence and interpretations of corporeality—in the form
of drawings, serial sections, models, scientific articles, and
stories—that changed the way embryos were envisioned
and imagined. Prior to this time, we might say that miscarried embryos lived and died “in nature,” without passing
through a cultural phase. The embryologists added a “cultural phase” to embryo existence, paradoxically, by turning
dead embryos into evidence of life. Their results produced
a material embryonic form upon which cultural attributes
could be projected.
Another challenge faced by the embryologists was to
dismantle the theory of prenatal influence. Well into the
twentieth century, many people, including doctors,
believed that the unborn child was subject to prenatal
influence (also called “maternal impressions”), defined as
“the idea…that the growing child may be marked, injured
or deformed in some way by the anger, fright, horror,
depression or other emotional disturbance of the mother”
(Reed 1924:17). Prenatal influence was blamed for birthmarks and birth defects such as cleft palate and clubfoot,
behavioral idiosyncrasies, food likes and dislikes, personality characteristics, and so on. The doctrine of prenatal
influence was more than idle belief; it was a prescription
for behavior. Pregnant women were not supposed to overstimulate, exert, or upset themselves for fear of adversely
affecting the child-to-be.5
Embryologists regarded the idea of prenatal influence
as biologically impossible. They insisted that the placenta
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created an impermeable barrier between pregnant woman
and embryo. Embryos, they said, should be regarded as
autonomous entities, and women as passive albeit indispensable “incubators” rather than active participants in the
production of new persons. In the following quotations, we
see how the scientists worked to establish embryonic autonomy, to sever the bond that connected woman to unborn
child, and to interpose the scientist as the voice of truth.
Superstitious mothers must be told that the infant from the
very first day of its being is an independent being. The mother
only provides its temporary dwelling place and supplies the
necessary nourishment. Heredity and influences of unknown
origin are solely responsible for accidental birthmarks and malformations. (Lamson 1916:87–88; emphasis in original)
The scientific fact is that it is impossible for the mother to
mark her offspring, either intentionally or by accident.
Physiologists who have worked industriously on the problem
declare unanimously that there is no nervous connection
between the mother and the babe. There is no means by
which a nervous or emotional impulse can be communicated to the child from the mother. Nutrition and excretion
are the only functions of the umbilical cord which joins the
child to the mother, and even through this the blood from
the mother does not pass back and forth directly. The nutritive particles and the waste are selected and separated out by
the action of certain specialized cells in the placenta. It
really seems as if Nature had purposely erected a barrier to
protect the child in the womb from injury. After the conception occurs the mother does not influence the babe. She
merely acts as a highly specialized incubator. (Reed 1924:17)
Mall opposed the theory of maternal impressions and
lamented the fact that some doctors still espoused it.
Specimen number 246 in Mall’s collection bears this note
from the doctor who donated it:
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The woman from whom this specimen was obtained is the
mother of two children, the youngest about seven years of
age. Since then she has had five miscarriages, all of about
the same age as this specimen. No history of syphilis, but
have started to give her iodine of potash, with the hope that
she may give birth to a child…. It would be interesting if the
great fire we had recently [the Baltimore fire of 1904] could
have played any part in this trouble, as she felt well up to
that time, and the fright due to the fear that the fire would
burn out her neighborhood, too, kept her in a state of great
excitement for about 24 hours. (quoted in Mall 1908:
244–245)
Mall committed himself to correcting this error. The
following passage contains an uncharacteristically self-congratulatory tone, accompanied by his unbridled disdain for
misinformed and improperly educated colleagues:
It may be noted here that the obstetricians and gynecologists of America as a class advocate strongly the theory of
maternal impresses [sic], due largely, no doubt, to their
insufficient scientific education. On the other hand, we may
pride ourselves over the masterful strokes of American teratologists against this theory; the experimental teratologists
have produced double monsters, spina bifida and cyclopia,
under the very noses of these practitioners, but they continue their futile speculations over mere coincidences. (Mall
1908:4)
Although the embryologists’ outspoken opposition to
prenatal influence would ostensibly improve women’s scientific literacy, there were other issues at stake. The debate
gave embryologists an unprecedented occasion to boast
about their superiority over clinicians, as well as to argue
that all medical students should study embryology. It would
take a lot of work, Mall knew, to impose the correct
embryo-logic, but the embryologists’ prestige hung in the
balance. Embryologists could enhance their status and
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influence within the reproductive sciences if they could
show that pregnancy was not influenced by women’s
actions, emotions, or other social influences (except in
extreme circumstances such as starvation or opium or alcohol addiction). Miscarriage, for example, would have to be
regarded as the result of “faulty implantation” or “germ
defects” rather than the Baltimore fire. If the theory of prenatal influence could be discredited, then embryologists
would be exquisitely positioned to provide the most
authoritative knowledge about human development. The
notion of prenatal influence faded to the status of myth
just as the embryological worldview became ascendant. As
this transformation was achieved, gestation and the production of children came to be regarded as biological
processes largely beyond the scope of human agency.6
While the embryologists were involved in skirmishes
over prenatal influence and quickening, the embryo was
starting to receive its first social attributes. In My Birth, for
example, the embryo emerged as an opinionated little
protocitizen during an era of heightened American consternation over foreign immigration and high immigrant
fertility. Lamson, herself an immigrant, was undoubtedly
conscious of the eugenicist stigma against foreigners that
permeated medical discourse, which might explain why
she cast her embryo protagonist as a nationalist:
It seems that I have to bear that name [“fetus”] until the
time comes when I am born and my parents give me a permanent name. I hope that name, which I shall have to bear
all through life, will be the true product of the country I am
to call my “country.” It is a pity that a great country, like the
one to be mine, is filled with names founded on stolen or
borrowed roots from dead countries and gone people. It
seems to me it is time that there should be invented names
which stand for American liberty and democracy for
American boys and American girls to live up to. Such a one I
would wish to bear. (Lamson 1916:110)
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Lamson’s patriotic little embryo suggested that being born
was like coming to America, picking (or sometimes being
involuntarily granted) a new name to mark the change in
residence and identity.
In hindsight, we can see that the cultural work performed by embryologists was extraordinarily important.
They conceived the embryo as a purely biological product,
dismissed any notion of social influence over gestation,
and relegated women to an ancillary, incidental role in
development. They legitimated the collection and possession of human embryos, claiming them as literal possessions under the law as well as their own intellectual property (Morgan 2002). They ascribed to themselves the
power to define what constituted legitimate embryological
knowledge and who they would allow to generate and pursue that knowledge. This is a story about the professionalization of embryology, but it is also much more than that.
Out of this scientific practice emerged a social entity that
would eventually come to hold enormous power.
F R O M A N I M A L TA I L S T O H U M A N TA L E S
Today embryos and fetuses have moved far out of the
laboratory and beyond the realm of embryology; they live
in common public space, where warring constituencies battle over what they will mean. A hundred years ago, almost
the opposite was taking place. To the extent that anyone
took an interest in human embryos and fetuses, embryologists were moving them from the realm of women and families into the inner sanctums of science. By the time the
embryos began to speak, therefore, the embryologists were
the only ones around to listen. Or, to put it another way,
the embryologists granted themselves the prerogative of
animating the embryos and deciding what they had to say.
What were those embryonic tales?
A hundred years ago even the humanity of the human
embryo was not yet secured. Whether because of the work
then being performed by the experimentalists at Woods
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Hole (Werdinger 1980) or because of the associations suggested by embryo morphology, human embryos were apt to
be described using piscine metaphors. Many accounts
emphasized their fishlike bodies, gill slits, and tails. The
Woods Hole embryologists should have been Mall’s natural allies, but they were more excited by their fish and frog
experiments than by Mall’s pedestrian morphological project. In comparison with the experiments they were conducting, relatively little cachet was attached to sectioning
human embryos. In 1907, for example, Mall received a letter from his friend William G. MacCallum, who wrote, “I
have been trying my hand at transplanting brains, livers
and such things from one frog to another—I find they
stand a tremendous deal of ill usage. My frog with two
brains walks backwards always, and is eccentric in many
ways.” Mall slogged on, untempted by the experimentalists
and never included in the inner circle at Woods Hole. He
was left with the challenge of how to anthropomorphize his
specimens, to distinguish them from the many other
embryos competing for attention.
There were at the time at least two competing theories
about how the “basic unity of animals from ameba to man”
(Aberle and Corner 1953:7) might manifest itself in embryological development. Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), the
German biologist and philosopher, argued that the evolution of the entire animal kingdom was recapitulated in the
embryonic development of a single organism (“ontogeny
follows phylogeny”). According to Haeckel’s recapitulation
theory, young human embryos pass quickly through all evolutionary stages on their way to assuming the human form
(see Gould 1977, 2000). Ernest von Baer (1792–1876), in
contrast, had argued that “development, as a universal pattern, must proceed from the general to the specific”
(Gould 2000:48). Von Baer said that the early developmental stages of embryos would be more similar among
related species than the later stages. This was one of the
debates that shaped the meanings attached to human
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embryos; it constituted the filter through which embryologists examined and interpreted their specimens. When the
embryologists peered through their microscopes at sectioned embryos, they had on their minds questions of recapitulation and anthropomorphization (Corner 1944).
Whichever theory they subscribed to, there was one point
of agreement: evidence would be found by examining actual embryos and by comparing embryos from different
species. The answer was in the body.
The tail was one important bodily feature in the
Haeckelian debate, but the tail was also arguably the characteristic that brought human embryos into public discourse. One disturbing aspect of the embryological account
of development was the revelation that all human embryos,
regardless of race, possess tails. Possession of a tail was evidence of animality: monkeys and donkeys had tails; humans
(especially civilized humans) most certainly did not.
Am I satry or man?
Pray tell me who can,
And settle my place in the scale;
A man in ape’s shape,
An anthropoid ape,
Or a monkey deprived of a tail?
—Punch, 1861, quoted in Corner 1944:131
How could human embryos have such an unhuman (or
antihuman) characteristic as a tail? Embryonic tails challenged the notion that man was created in God’s image;
indeed, Satan’s tail marked him as evil. The embryonic tail
also challenged the conviction that a body should reflect
the uniqueness and purity of the species. As an embodied
contravention of the symbolic boundary between humans
and animals, the tail was depressing news. Yet the evidence
emanating from the embryologist’s laboratory could not be
disputed; this was the corporeal form that science revealed.
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The tail would have to be explained, accommodated, and
controlled. Here I mention four efforts made by embryologists and their proponents to discipline and regulate the
embryonic tail.
Telling Tails
Lamson’s embryonic protagonist in My Birth was quite
proud of her developmental progress, with one exception.
She found her tail to be embarrassing and shameful.
Lamson, in her three-week embryo persona, reported:
“Fortunately my body—with a head and tail end—had
taken such a curved attitude that the latter, painfully suggestive of my remote ancestors, was carefully hidden away
from sight. It is perhaps for this reason that all undeveloped beings like me modestly retain such a position until
they have received all the pleasing features of man”
(Lamson 1916:60).
Lamson’s narrator thought her strong bones “remarkable,” but she always mentioned her tail with chagrin:
“There was in reality so little of me, and that very ungainly.
In spite of my remarkable skeleton, externally I was just a
fishlike being with an ugly and unproportioned head and
a suggestive and offensive looking tail” (1916:67–68). And
later: “Another happy incident, which had already taken
place by the fourth month, was the complete disappearance of my tail—an embarrassing heritage from my remote
ancestors. But at that time all of it was well buried within
the tissues of that neighborhood” (Lamson 1916:109).
Lamson obviously wanted embryos to speak about progressive, corporeal development, but the tail (“painful, suggestive, offensive”) presented a formidable challenge.
Lamson’s embryo did what any good late-Victorian girl
would do under the circumstances: she hid it modestly,
buried it under other tissues, and waited for it to go away
so she could stop looking like a fish and achieve the “pleasing features of man.”
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Tails of the Orient
Whereas Lamson represented the embryonic tail as an
impediment to individual progress and achievement,
Adolph Hans Schultz (1891–1976) presented the human
tail as evidence of embodied racial difference. Schultz was
a Swiss physical anthropologist and primatologist who
came to Baltimore from Zurich in 1916 to work in Mall’s
lab measuring embryos. He published prolifically on comparisons between animal and human embryos and
between white and Negro embryos, including two articles
specifically about embryonic tails. In his 1925 article
“Embryological Evidence of the Evolution of Man,” Schultz
wrote that “man, in the embryonic state, still possesses a
true external tail” (1925a:249). He mentioned, on the basis
of an 1889 Scientific American account, the case of a twelveyear-old boy from French Indochina who had a nine-inchlong external tail. Schultz included a picture he had drawn
from a photograph of the child, who appears nude except
for the ankle bracelets that, along with his tail, mark him as
doubly primitive (fig. 9.1).
By drawing the comparison between the Western, civilized, embryonic tail and the fully articulated tail of a primitive Other, Schultz created two effects: he showed “us” to
be more highly evolved than “them,” and he positioned scientists as the arbiters of biological and ethnological truths.
De-tails
Ross G. Harrison (1870–1959), also an embryologist,
was not in the least tempted by ethnological comparison,
because in his view the body would reveal all. Harrison
spent the early years of his career at Johns Hopkins, working with the embryologists and studying nerve development by grafting tails onto frogs. He published one article
about human tails, which he called “caudal appendages”
(note the semantic shift from popular to scientific terminology). He began by acknowledging the widespread belief
that some peoples had tails but said his review of the liter-
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Figure 9.1
Adolph Schultz’s drawing of an Indochinese boy with a tail, published in his 1925 article
“Embryological Evidence of the Evolution of Man.” Reprinted with permission of the
Washington Academy of Sciences.
ature on humans did not support accounts about “various
lands supposed at one time or other to have been the
haunts of human races with tails” (Harrison 1901:96).
Harrison retold the story, converting it from fairy tale to
scientific truth. He concluded that travelers’ fanciful stories should be replaced by scientific observation; his
approach was to bring the tail into the medical realm.
He knew from personal experience that individual
humans were occasionally born with tails. The remainder
of his article described a de-tailing operation he performed
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on a six-month-old child in Baltimore, from whom he
removed a seven-centimeter tail. Using meticulous anthropometric techniques, Harrison dissected, measured, and
otherwise subjected (and subjugated) the tail to medicine’s
objectifying gaze. He produced pages of measurements
that allowed him to address an ongoing debate about
whether human embryonic tails shrank in the course of
development or whether they were swallowed up “as a
result of the growth of the extremities and the gluteal
region” (Harrison 1901:101). This arcane debate—and the
embryologists’ concomitant project to medicalize the
anomalous human tail—continued for many years as the
embryologists “de-tailed” one embryo after another (see
Kunitomo 1918).
Monkey Business
The most pressing and problematic evocation of
embryonic tails occurred in debates over whether humans
had evolved from apes. Schultz could not resist invoking
the embryonic tail once the Scopes trial got under way in
Dayton, Tennessee, in July 1925. He had turned down an
invitation to provide scientific testimony in support of the
Darwinian theory of evolution: “D. F. Malone had wired me
from Dayton, inviting me to come as expert witness but I
declined to participate in that circus” (Schultz 1925c).
Schultz may have refused to take the stand, but he nonetheless felt obligated to take a stand. At home in his chimpanzee lab, he named the largest male chimp “Dayton.”
Unlike Lamson, who found the tail an affront to modesty
and humanity, Schultz seemed amused by it. He wanted to
argue that humans and monkeys were descended from a
common ancestor, so he used the tail metonymically to
portray the human embryo as unborn monkey.
With the trial in full swing, Schultz wrote a short article
for Scientific Monthly called “Man’s Embryonic Tail”
(Schultz 1925b), which began: “How can a self-respecting
scientist claim that his and everybody else’s ancestors once
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possessed tails like those of monkeys? For no less a reason
than that every man at an early stage in his own life-time is
ornamented with such an appendage, which, to be true,
serves no other purpose than that perhaps of making him
feel justly proud of the fact that this organ long ago ceased
to be a permanent part of his outer body” (Schultz
1925b:141).
Not only did human embryos possess tails, Schultz
teased, but our human ancestors once wagged them. He
pointed out that human adults sport “purposeless” muscles
in their rear ends that “invariably correspond to muscles
found in the tails of monkeys” (Schultz 1925b:142). Schultz
used the occasion of the Scopes trial to focus on the
embryo tail, which would tell a story about the continuity
between humans and animals rather than about human
distinctiveness. As evidence of his claim, he taught the
embryos to bend over and display their backsides.
T R A N S N AT I O N A L A N D R A C I A L E M B RY O L O G Y
The human embryologists of Mall’s day wondered
whether embryos would embody racial differences the way
they embodied species differences. Progressive-era doctors
and other social reformers in Baltimore were concerned
about the effects of immigration on medical and public
health problems. The eugenics movement was becoming
popular with intellectuals, politicians, and the lay public,
many of whom presumed that there must be a biological
basis to social and racial inequality. In this climate, some
embryologists expected to find racial differences embodied in the structure of human embryos (Schultz 1925a).
Racial embryology was encouraged by physical anthropologists, who were at the time busy collecting, measuring,
and comparing specimens of different racial “types”
(Cotkin 1992:70–71). One such anthropologist, Al?s
Hrdli?ka, at the United States National Museum (later the
Smithsonian Institution), regularly asked Mall—who had
charge of a large anatomy lab—to assist him in building a
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collection. In November 1904, for example, Mall reportedly donated thirty-five fetal and newborn specimens—all
“colored”—to Hrdli?ka, with subsequent “gifts” in 1906
and 1908 (Gindhart 1989:891). The physical anthropologists thought it likely that the CIWDE embryo collection
would reveal racial differences at the earliest stage of development, and they urged Mall to compare the embryos on
the basis of race. Mall was not immediately persuaded by
their arguments. He was an admirer of Franz Boas, who was
then lobbying against immigration restrictions and biologically deterministic ideologies. Mall considered himself an
egalitarian, so he was not convinced that racial differences
would necessarily be evident in embryological development. But he was too much of a positivist to draw conclusions without solid evidence, so in the 1910s he embarked
on a deliberate effort to collect embryo specimens of different racial types.
Mall never published any data pertaining to racial differences in embryos, but he occasionally wrote about racial
differences in adults, and he permitted other researchers
to use his adult anatomical specimens for their investigations. Between 1904 and 1906, for example, he allowed a
young anatomist named Robert Bean to weigh and measure 150 brains from his anatomical laboratory, at
Hrdli?ka’s suggestion. Bean used the measurements to support Hrdli?ka’s assertion that “racial differences exist in the
Negro brain” (Bean 1906:354). Bean concluded that
Negro brains were smaller than Caucasian brains, “the difference being primarily in the frontal lobe” (1906:411).
Based on his assumptions about the functions of anterior
and posterior parts of the brain (“association centers”),
Bean concluded, “The Negro has lower mental faculties
(smell, sight, handicraftsmanship, body-sense, melody)
well developed, the Caucasian the higher (self-control, will
power, ethical and aesthetic senses and reason)” (Bean
1906:412).
Mall refuted Bean’s measurements and conclusions in
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print, thereby distancing himself from Hrdli?ka as well as
from the project of scientific racism. Mall measured 106
brains himself. He charged that Bean had used an inaccurate measuring device “borrowed from the Smithsonian
Institution” (i.e., from Hrdli?ka) and that Bean had
allowed personal prejudice (which Mall called “the personal equation”) to influence his observations. To prevent
this from happening to him, Mall conducted his research
blind, “without…knowing the race or sex of any of the individuals from which the brains were taken” (Mall 1909:9).
He concluded that “with the methods at our disposal it is
impossible to detect a relative difference in the weight or
size of the frontal lobe due to either race or sex, and that
probably none exists” (1909:15–16).
Without many more embryo specimens, especially from
overseas, Mall was unwilling to conclude that differences
among his specimens should be attributed to race. Other
factors that might account for the morphological variation,
in his view, included geography, nationality, and other
unspecified “conditions.” In order to answer these questions, he would have to expand his collection. We know
that by 1915 Mall had a few embryological specimens from
the Philippine Islands. These may have been collected by
his close friends and colleagues Lewellys Barker, Simon
Flexner, and other members of the Johns Hopkins medical
team sent to the Philippines in 1899 by the Rockefeller
Foundation for the purpose of collecting comparative
anatomical material from the colonies after the SpanishAmerican war. Barker’s description of the trip mentioned
that the team brought back “a large amount of pathological material to be studied later in Baltimore,” although he
did not mention embryos specifically (Barker 1942:71). We
also know that by 1915 Mall counted among his collection
“a few pathological specimens from China,” of which he
said, “A preliminary survey of these specimens shows that
they are unlike those obtained in the United States which
indicates that there are special conditions in the Orient
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which we do not encounter here” (Mall 1915). Embryos
sent from overseas, however, were useful only if accompanied by detailed histories. In an admonishing letter to
Manila, Mall thanked a Dr. Hammach for the specimens he
had sent and requested additional information: “From an
anthropological standpoint we like to have our specimens
identified…. I am anxious to know whether any of these
specimens are white” (Mall 1914).
Mall had special hope for embryological specimens
from what was then called the Orient, because he knew
that miscegenation had already diluted many preexisting
racial distinctions in North America. In 1905 he requested
an “Indian brain” from a pathologist in Canada, who
replied: “By the way I am a little doubtful as to the purity of
the Indian strain throughout the Dominion. About here all
the Indians have suspiciously French names, and when one
remembers the moral character of the old ‘Courreurs de
Bois’ one is inclined to suspect the origin of these names”
(Molson 1905).
Nevertheless, Mall wondered whether differences would
be discernable if he could find enough examples of undiluted racial types. With that in mind, he wrote a circular
titled “On the Study of Racial Embryology” and sent it to
doctors on Canadian Native reservations asking them to preserve specimens for him. He explained his need this way:
It is now desired to collect specimens from different portions of the world in order to ascertain whether the percentage of the types of variation as well as of pathological
condition are constant in widely separated regions. We are
still wholly ignorant regarding these points, but in order to
test them I venture to ask whether it would not be possible to
obtain specimens from your country in order to aid us in
this work.
If differences exist they would most likely be found
in specimens collected from widely separated countries
occupied by different races living under very different con-
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ditions. We can now compare European specimens with
American whites; American whites with American negroes;
and those from country districts with those from cities.
We should like to include in this study embryos from
American Indians, for we believe that the hygienic, sociological, and racial conditions between them and European
embryos are greater than between American white and
American negro embryos which come from people living
under similar influences. Could you not inform me
whether it would be possible to secure Indian specimens
from British North America? (Mall n.d.)
Embryos from afar were slow to arrive, however,
because missionary doctors had limited opportunities to
encounter them. One doctor wrote from British Columbia
that in ten years’ experience he had “seen but one case of
abortion and only two of miscarriage and these at six
months. These Indians are not very prompt in sending for
medical attendance in case of sickness as the old women
manage all such cases” (Henderson 1916). A similar letter
came from Nova Scotia: “I have attended the Indians here
for many years but have never met with a case of abortion”
(Buckley 1916). And a physician writing from Ontario said,
“The Indians seldom call a medical man for confinement
or abortions and it will likely be some time before I will be
able to procure specimens” (Gillie 1906).
Mall would have liked to do comparative research on
foreign embryos himself, but during his lifetime he was
never able to amass a sufficient number of embryos to feel
confident about any conclusions he might draw. By the
time he died, he had not published a record of the foreign
embryos he had received or any comprehensive account of
the racial composition of his own extensive embryo collection. The closest estimate of the racial composition of the
Carnegie specimens comes from an article by Schultz, who
happily took over the job of collecting foreign and racially
distinct embryos after Mall died. Schultz wrote that of 704
of the “normal” specimens in good condition he studied,
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70 percent were white, 18 percent were Negro, and the rest
were “other” (4 percent) or unidentified as to race
(Schultz 1920). As Schultz set out to collect nonwhite
embryos, he explained his project to a colleague working
at San Juan Pueblo, New Mexico:
[I am engaged in] an anthropological study of racial characteristics as found in human embryos, which has been based
for the most part upon the Embryological Collection of the
Carnegie Institution of Washington. This comprises over
2000 specimens, most of these being white; but there are also
a considerable number of negroes and a sprinkling of representatives of other races, such as Japanese, Malayan, etc.
I have found marked racial differences even in the early
stages of development. At the same time the individual
variability is very great, and therefore we need a much
more extensive material for study before definitive and
trustworthy statements on the subject of racial peculiarities
can be made. Of Indian embryos we have but a few.
Nevertheless an examination of the latter, which show
marked differences in the proportions of the face and
other parts of the body as compared with white and negro
in corresponding stages of development, convinces me
that a further study of Indian embryos promises the most
interesting results. (Schultz 1918)
Most contemporary embryologists and physical anthropologists would agree that evolutionary racism—such as
Schultz’s comparison of the size of the nose in Negro and
white fetuses (1920)—has long since been consigned to
the dustbin of anthropological history. With the exception
of antievolution creationists, some of whom are still devoted to explaining away the embryonic tail,7 most embryologists find little of interest in the embryonic tail. The significant point for our purposes is that the embryologists, like
the creationists, tended to discover in embryos precisely
what they were looking for. That tendency is still very much
with us.
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DISCUSSION
Today, images of embryos and fetuses speak loudly
about gender and reproductive politics. A hundred years
ago they spoke about the singularity or continuity of
humans in relation to nonhuman animals. How do we
decide what embryos signify? What tales do they tell? The
examples presented here suggest that embryo meanings
arise out of historically particular social anxieties and controversies. A hundred years ago, embryologists were surrounded by controversy over immigration policy, evolution, eugenics and “race betterment,” and comparative
anatomy. They spoke about those issues using the embryo
as their medium. Today, the repertoire with which embryos
are associated has been both pruned and expanded. They
speak now with expert authority about grand themes:
morality, compassion, kinship, the human condition. They
reserve their most trenchant commentaries for the politics
of gender, reproduction, and the commodification of body
parts.8 The historical contrast shows the extent to which
embryos take their meanings from the scripts they are
asked to read, rather than from features of the embryos
per se or from an unambiguous reading of sectioned specimens. Embryos do not create social controversies; rather,
social controversies create embryos.
The practice of collecting human embryos—slicing
them into serial sections and interpreting the results
through the lens of biological science—was part of the
effort to discipline, regulate, and control the embryonic
form (Clarke 1998). But just as embryologists materialized
the embryonic body and claimed it for science, so they felt
authorized to control and shape the interpretations that
would be made of it. The embryologists simultaneously
denied their own authorship, claiming that the embryo was
speaking for itself. Their interpretations of the embryo’s
corporeal features were ostensibly based on a rational,
unemotional examination of the biological evidence. Yet
from today’s vantage point we can see that their readings
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were products of the times in which they lived. We can also
see the lasting social consequences of the knowledge they
produced. They helped to construe the human embryo as
an autonomous actor, detachable (at least for heuristic purposes) from women’s bodies and motivated solely by biological forces. They helped to position the embryo as an
arbiter in disputes over the moral implications of possessing particular bodily features, a practice that continues
today. By allowing embryos to take sides in the culture war
over evolution, the embryologists introduced them to politics while ignoring pregnant women and the social circumstances that influence whether and how nascent persons
come into being. In all these ways, the embryologists
breathed life into their precious specimens, animating
them to tell their embryonic tales.
Notes
Research for this essay was funded by a fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and by a faculty fellowship from Mount Holyoke
College. I would like to thank Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock for animating
this essay, and I am grateful to the participants in the “Animation and Cessation”
seminar for their support, collegiality, and constructive input on an earlier draft.
1. See, for example, Casper 1998; Duden 1999; Franklin 1991; Haraway
1997b; Hartouni 1993, 1997; Michaels 1999; Newman 1996; Oaks 2000; Petchesky
1987; Roth 2000; Taylor 1992, 1998.
2. American physicians crusading against abortion in the 1860–1880s did
invoke the embryo as a living being, but their assertions about embryonic life
were based more on commonsense speculation and imagination than on tangible
evidence or knowledge about the physical characteristics of the embryo. Few of
them had seen many human embryos, and virtually none conducted any
systematic research in human embryology. Not until the 1890s did a few American
anatomists embark on the empirical study of human embryos.
3. The most recent manifestations of the abortion debate in the United
States have been waged over stem cell research and the disposition of “surplus
embryos” resulting from in vitro technologies of assisted reproduction.
Consequently, the term “embryo” has surfacing in the news. A Lexis-Nexis keyword search of major newspapers for the year beginning 3 February 2000 yielded
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908 articles that mentioned the word “embryo,” 433 that mentioned “fetus,” 221
that mentioned “unborn child,” and 3 that mentioned “blastocyst.”
4. For an earlier example, see The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman, by Laurence Stern, published in separate volumes between 1759 and
1767.
5. A feminist analysis would note that the theory of maternal impressions
functioned to give women a justification for controlling their activities and those
of the people around them. In addition, it located responsibility for good reproductive outcomes within the social arena, where people could influence those
outcomes through their actions, rather than in the scientific arena, where they
were removed from social reach.
6. The idea of prenatal influence is coming back into vogue, not just in
physiological terms (such as the effects of gestational diabetes or fetal alcohol
syndrome) but in social terms as well. Examples include the well-known work of
Marie-Claire Busnel and colleagues, who show that fetuses discern music and
voices (http://www.france.diplomatie.fr/label_france/ENGLISH/DOSSIER/
enfance/03.html), which has led to stories of pregnant women playing Mozart
to their fetuses. Christopher Coe, a biological psychologist at the University of
Wisconsin, studies psychological and environmental influences on prenatal
development (http://psych.wisc.edu/faculty/bio/coe.html).
7. See the website http://www.angelfire.com/mi/dinosaurs/tailbone.html.
8. See the controversy over the fetal collections of the Institute of Child
Health of the University of Liverpool. The Royal Liverpool Children’s inquiry
report can be found at http://www.rlcinquiry.org.uk/.
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